Summary of important user-visible changes for version 3.6:
---------------------------------------------------------
** The PCRE library is now required to build Octave. If a pre-compiled
package does not exist for your system, you can find PCRE sources
at http://www.pcre.org
** The ARPACK library is no longer distributed with Octave.
If you need the eigs or svds functions you must provide an
external ARPACK through a package manager or by compiling it
yourself. If a pre-compiled package does not exist for your system,
you can find the current ARPACK sources at
http://forge.scilab.org/index.php/p/arpack-ng
** Many of Octave's binary operators (.*, .^, +, -, ...) now perform
automatic broadcasting for array operations which allows you to use
operator notation instead of calling bsxfun or expanding arrays (and
unnecessarily wasting memory) with repmat or similar idioms. For
example, to scale the columns of a matrix by the elements of a row
vector, you may now write
rv .* M
In this expression, the number of elements of rv must match the
number of columns of M. The following operators are affected:
plus + .+
minus - .-
times .*
rdivide ./
ldivide .\
power .^ .**
lt <
le <=
eq ==
gt >
ge >=
ne != ~=
and &
or |
atan2
hypot
max
min
mod
rem
xor
additionally, since the A op= B assignment operators are equivalent
to A = A op B, the following operators are also affected:
+= -= .+= .-= .*= ./= .\= .^= .**= &= |=
See the "Broadcasting" section in the new "Vectorization and Faster
Code Execution" chapter of the manual for more details.
** Octave now features a profiler, thanks to the work of Daniel Kraft
under the Google Summer of Code mentorship program. The manual has
been updated to reflect this addition. The new user-visible
functions are profile, profshow, and profexplore.
** Overhaul of statistical distribution functions
Functions now return "single" outputs for inputs of class "single".
75% reduction in memory usage through use of logical indexing.
Random sample functions now use the same syntax as rand and accept
a comma separated list of dimensions or a dimension vector.
Functions have been made Matlab-compatible with regard to special
cases (probability on boundaries, probabilities for values outside
distribution, etc.). This may cause subtle changes to existing
scripts.
negative binomial function has been extended to real, non-integer
inputs. The discrete_inv function now returns v(1) for 0 instead of
NaN. The nbincdf function has been recoded to use a closed form
solution with betainc.
** strread, textscan, and textread have been completely revamped.
They now support nearly all Matlab functionality including:
* Matlab-compatible whitespace and delimiter defaults
* Matlab-compatible options: 'whitespace', treatasempty', format
string repeat count, user-specified comment style, uneven-length
output arrays, %n and %u conversion specifiers (provisionally)
** All .m string functions have been modified for better performance or
greater Matlab compatibility. Performance gains of 15X-30X have
been demonstrated. Operations on cell array of strings no longer pay
quite as high a penalty as those on 2-D character arrays.
deblank: Now requires character or cellstr input.
strtrim: Now requires character or cellstr input.
No longer trims nulls ("\0") from string for Matlab
compatibility.
strmatch: Follows documentation precisely and ignores trailing spaces
in pattern and in string. Note that this is documented
Matlab behavior but the implementation apparently does
not always follow it.
substr: Now possible to specify a negative LEN option which
extracts to within LEN of the end of the string.
strtok: Now accepts cellstr input.
base2dec, bin2dec, hex2dec:
Now accept cellstr inputs.
dec2base, dec2bin, dec2hex:
Now accept cellstr inputs.
index, rindex:
Now accept 2-D character array input.
strsplit: Now accepts 2-D character array input.
** Geometry functions derived from Qhull (convhull, delaunay, voronoi)
have been revamped. The options passed to the underlying qhull
command have been changed for better results or for Matlab
compatibility.
convhull: Default options are "Qt" for 2D, 3D, 4D inputs
Default options are "Qt Qx" for 5D and higher
delaunay: Default options are "Qt Qbb Qc Qz" for 2D and 3D inputs
Default options are "Qt Qbb Qc Qx" for 4D and higher
voronoi: No default arguments
** Date/Time functions updated. Millisecond support with FFF format
string now supported.
datestr: Numerical formats 21, 22, 29 changed to match Matlab.
Now accepts cellstr input.
** The following warning IDs have been removed:
Octave:associativity-change
Octave:complex-cmp-ops
Octave:empty-list-elements
Octave:fortran-indexing
Octave:precedence-change
** The warning ID Octave:string-concat has been renamed to
Octave:mixed-string-concat.
** Octave now includes the following Matlab-compatible preference
functions:
addpref getpref ispref rmpref setpref
** The following Matlab-compatible handle graphics functions have been
added:
guidata uipanel uitoolbar
guihandles uipushtool uiwait
uicontextmenu uiresume waitfor
uicontrol uitoggletool
The uiXXX functions above are experimental.
Except for uiwait and uiresume, the uiXXX functions are not
supported with the FLTK+OpenGL graphics toolkit.
The gnuplot graphics toolkit does not support any of the uiXXX
functions nor the waitfor function.
** New keyword parfor (parallel for loop) is now recognized as a valid
keyword. Implementation, however, is still mapped to an ordinary
for loop.
** Other new functions added in 3.6.0:
bicg nthargout usejava
is_dq_string narginchk waitbar
is_sq_string python zscore
is_function_handle register_graphics_toolkit
loaded_graphics_toolkits recycle
** Deprecated functions.
The following functions were deprecated in Octave 3.2 and have been
removed from Octave 3.6.
create_set spcholinv splu
dmult spcumprod spmax
iscommand spcumsum spmin
israwcommand spdet spprod
lchol spdiag spqr
loadimage spfind spsum
mark_as_command sphcat spsumsq
mark_as_rawcommand spinv spvcat
spatan2 spkron str2mat
spchol splchol unmark_command
spchol2inv split unmark_rawcommand
The following functions have been deprecated in Octave 3.6 and will
be removed from Octave 3.10 (or whatever version is the second major
release after 3.6):
cut is_duplicate_entry
cor polyderiv
corrcoef shell_cmd
__error_text__ studentize
error_text sylvester_matrix